


Rightful Heirs

by StrictlyNoFrills



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: (You KNOW which characters that's for), Canon - Book & Movie Combination, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Fantasy, Female Gimli, Friendship, Full of arrows and protecting hobbits to our last breath, Gen, Hobbit and LotR AU, The War of the Ring, War of the Ring, no beta we die like Boromir
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-20
Updated: 2021-01-20
Packaged: 2021-03-18 13:47:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28868022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StrictlyNoFrills/pseuds/StrictlyNoFrills
Summary: They have been hidden for many years, wandering the lands unseen or else unremarked. Yet when darkness looms, it is time to put away old fears and regrets of the past and to work together to protect the future for all the free peoples of Middle Earth.It is time to stand so that the world does not fall.
Relationships: Aragorn | Estel & Gandalf | Mithrandir & Gimli (Son of Glóin) & Legolas Greenleaf, Boromir (Son of Denethor II) & Merry Brandybuck & Pippin Took, Frodo Baggins & Merry Brandybuck & Sam Gamgee & Pippin Took, Kíli (Tolkien)/Tauriel (Hobbit Movies), Legolas Greenleaf & Tauriel, fem!Gimli/Legolas Greenleaf
Comments: 9
Kudos: 15





	Rightful Heirs

**Author's Note:**

> I know. ANOTHER work in progress. 
> 
> "Strictly," you all ask, shaking your heads, "what are you doing?"
> 
> I'm just going where the muse takes me, my duckies. Sometimes, that's all a writer can do.
> 
> This is my first (published) attempt to bridge _The Hobbit_ films and _Lord of the Rings_ , and I will be playing fast and loose with which parts I draw from the films and which parts I draw from the novels.
> 
> It all started with an idea: Tauriel was able to heal Kili from a fatal wound once. Why could she not do so again? Updates, as I'm sure you've come to expect from yours truly, will be sporadic.
> 
> You can check out the moodboard for this story here on my Tumblr page: https://strictlynofrills.tumblr.com/post/640798584818827264/rightful-heirs-a-lord-of-the-rings-au-part-i-an

Kili would not look at her. His eyes remained fixed upon the rising flames of this night’s campfire, his face cast in shadows that obscured his features. Still, she could see plainly the clench of his jaw, in spite of how thick his beard had grown over the years.

“You had the dream again, didn’t you?” Tauriel asked, breaking the heavy silence which had hung over them all day in an uncharacteristic pall. No matter how many years they had been married, Kili always found something new and exciting to talk about. Each day was different and brought new wonder, but today…

For the past few weeks, Kili had dreamed of a raven with red feathers in its plume flying into a vast darkness that threatened to swallow it whole.

The first morning Kili awoke from the dream, he was curious. The second, shaken. The mornings after had seen him fall ever deeper into this grave silence.

“What do you want to do, melleth nin?”

Perhaps they could seek out a member of one of the other dwarven clans with the gift of foresight. Or perhaps they might visit the Brown Wizard, as they had done several times in the past. Briefly, her thoughts wandered to Bombadil and Goldberry, but Tauriel dismissed the idea as swiftly as it arrived. Tom Bombadil and his lovely wife were good friends and excellent hosts, but not much concerned with the cares of the outside world.

Kili bit his lip and raised his eyes to Tauriel’s at last.

“Oh, I think you know.”

Tauriel went still, as her people were wont, the denial on the tip of her tongue lying there too long and growing fallow.

There was one possibility which Tauriel had refused to entertain, largely, she suspected, because if she had, she would have been forced to admit that it was the most logical.

“You wish to seek counsel from one of my people.”

Kili reached out and took one of her hands in his own.

“Lord Elrond was wise and far kinder than we could have expected when the Company stayed in Rivendell. I do not believe he would turn us away.”

Thranduil had always felt a bit of animosity towards the lord of Imladris. He never said anything outright, but Tauriel grew up playing with his son in Thranduil’s shadow. She knew him well enough to read between the lines. His bitterness over being forced to protect his people without the aid of one of the elven rings of power had soured his feelings towards Lord Elrond, especially as the time of their peoples began to dwindle.

The elves of Mirkwood had managed to hold back the hands of the Enemy for centuries, and being so insular, had largely managed to resist the call of the sea, but doom came even to their part of the world eventually. Tauriel remembered the melancholy her former king had fallen into the day the first of their people set out towards the grey havens.

It was into this black mood that the Company which had brought Kili into her life had stumbled during their quest to retake the Lonely Mountain.

She shook her head at herself. Thranduil had not been her king for many years now, and his opinions need not be her own. For Kili to speak so highly of Lord Elrond said much, as he had always been a keen judge of character.

“No,” she said at last. “No, I do not believe he would either. But he might feel obligated to…”

“Make our presence known to those in Erebor?” Kili finished for her, deliberately keeping his tone light and unconcerned.

Tauriel was not fooled. “Are you ready for all that such an announcement might entail?”

“Are you?” Kili asked gently.

“I am ready for anything, so long as I may face it with you.”

Tauriel had no family to disappoint, aside from her husband, and though they’d had disagreements and misunderstandings in the past, Kili had a forgiving heart and they always did their best to resolve things quickly. It was a blessing, given that, for all intents and purposes, they were all they had in the world.

Kili, though… Kili had a mother, and many cousins, all of whom, to her knowledge, still lived.

He had yearned for his mother in the years since Tauriel carried him from the battlefield stretched out before Erebor’s gates, yet he had never once seemed willing to reveal himself to the dam. Without his uncle and his brother, Kili had not been able to face the thought of seeing his mother again.

“If I hadn’t persuaded our uncle to fight that day…” Kili had said once, in the beginning, when Tauriel had confronted him about the weight that had clearly been hanging heavily upon his then-narrow shoulders in the shape of King Thorin and Prince Fili’s loss. Rarely did they discuss the matter of his guilt-driven regret now, but Tauriel knew that it plagued him still, though not as keenly as it once did. Time did, after all, dull the pain of most wounds.

“Then I am ready as well. What is there to fear if you are with me?” Kili asked, tugging her gently down to press her forehead against his own.

What, indeed?

* * *

A flash of crimson was all the warning Tauriel received before the sound of a fist striking flesh hit her ears. She blinked and stared down at the top of the fiery-headed dwarf who had punched her husband, her hands going automatically towards the knives at her back. The weariness from the months of travel it had taken them to reach Rivendell had done nothing to slow her response to anything that might threaten Kili.

To say that this was not what Tauriel had expected when Lord Elrond spoke with them shortly after their arrival in Rivendell this morning would be an understatement in the extreme. No indication had been given that others of Kili’s kind currently occupied the Last Homely House, and from what Kili had told her of this place, hostilities of any kind were strongly discouraged.

Even as he shook his head and opened and closed his eyes in reaction to the unexpected pain, clutching at his split lip with one hand, Kili stilled her with the other. “Easy, Amrâlimê. This is my little cousin, Gimli. Though,” he added, eyeing the other dwarf, “I’m not sure the word ‘little’ applies anymore. Look at you, Gims. You finally learned how to land a punch.”

Gimli’s already ruddy cheeks reddened even further. “Don’t call me that! Especially not here!”

“Right, of course,” Kili said sheepishly, perhaps remembering how embarrassing he had found it when he was younger to have family members refer to him by similar terms of affection whilst in mixed company. “My apologies, cousin.”

If possible, this only served to infuriate his cousin further.

“Oh, that’s what you’ll apologize for, is it? A minor embarrassment, that warrants some diplomacy, but disappearing into the ether for nigh on eighty years? Letting us all think you dead? Not even worthy of a passing remark! Do you have any idea how many tears your Amad has cried over you? I should demand you beard for that alone, you –“ Gimli descended into grumbled Khudzul which, had Tauriel been a more sheltered elf, would have blistered her ears. She was reluctantly impressed at the variety of words and the combinations Gimli used, even as she worried over what effect Gimli’s furious speech was having on her husband, whose face grew graver and whose eyes grew more pained as his cousin carried on.

Still, she would have to remember some of those phrases for her own use.

Eventually, Gimli’s torrent of irate Khudzul invectives petered out, and with a quiet scoff and a rough jerk, Kili’s cousin pulled him in to knock their foreheads together. Tauriel winced at the sound of the impact. These days, Kili was always careful when tapping his forehead against her own, but there had been a few missteps in the beginning, and so Tauriel knew intimately the hard-headedness of her husband’s people. She enjoyed those moments of intimacy between the two of them, but she did not wish to imagine what it would feel like at full force.

Kili, however, appeared overjoyed at Gimli’s gesture, his shoulders, which had begun to draw inward under the tirade, going lax. It was at this point that another, older dwarf whom Tauriel recognized appeared at Gimli’s shoulder.

“I ought to box your ears for all the grief you’ve brought our family,” Gloin said gruffly. “But I’m too glad to see you alive and well to bother.”

He spared Tauriel not even a passing glance as he yanked Kili away from his child and crushed Kili to his chest – a comical sight, as her husband was a good bit broader and taller than his elder, greying cousin. Kili gamely gathered Gloin closer, giving him a much gentler tap to the head then Gimli had afforded him, in deference to Gloin’s rather advanced age.

“Thorin?” a soft, papery voice asked.

Tauriel found that she needed to look even further down to see the face of this newcomer, as he was an old, slightly stooped, white-haired hobbit with a kind, leathery face.

Kili pulled away from Gloin, his face crumpling from the name and the face of the inquirer. “No, Bilbo. It’s just me. Just Kili.”

A sense of morbid fascination drew Tauriel back to study the hobbit’s face once more, even as she ached to offer Kili some sort of comfort. One day, Kili would look as weathered as this once-vibrant hobbit, Kili’s hearty frame worn down by time and use, and then, she would lose him, parted from him until battle or the unmaking of the world, and possibly even then. No elf could enter Aule’s halls, so far as Tauriel knew, and no dwarf could sail unto the Undying Lands.

“Kili? Can it really be you?” Bilbo asked, coming to stand before Kili. He reached up with his pale, age-spotted hands, and patted them against Kili’s heavily whiskered cheeks after Kili leant down obligingly.

“My, my. You look so much like your uncle. My dear boy,” Bilbo said, and a younger hobbit, who hovered beside Bilbo, blinked at the endearment.

Then, Bilbo tweaked Kili’s ear, and Kili pulled back. “You’ve been terribly missed, my lad. You really oughtn’t have disappeared for so long – and without a single word of farewell! That was rather badly done of you, you know.”

“Yes, Bilbo, I know. I’m very sorry,” Kilis said solemnly.

“Well, now,” Bilbo said soothingly, patting Kili’s chest now that he could no longer reach his cheek. “That’s alright, lad. Just see that you don’t do it again.” Bilbo glanced to the side and placed a hand on his hobbit companion’s shoulder. “Kili, son of Vili, this is Frodo Baggins, my nephew.”

Now that she turned to look at him directly, Tauriel could see how pale Frodo was. He had dark circles beneath his big, bright blue eyes, which held the after-image of some kind of horror deep within, and he had the gauntness of one who had recently lost a great deal of weight to illness. Even so, he was quite fair for what little she knew of hobbits, and a light seemed to settle faintly over his skin – the sort of light Tauriel had, until now, seen only in the stars and in her own people.

“Your nephew?” Kili asked before turning to Frodo. “Well, any kin of Bilbo is a friend of mine. Well met, Frodo Baggins.”

“Well met,” Frodo replied, his voice kind yet soft and somber. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“Have you?” Kili asked, shooting Bilbo a startled look.

“You didn’t think that Gandalf and the Company could drag me off to steal from a dragon without notice without me having to explain my extended absence upon my return to the Shire, did you? I had tenants! I have distant relations that very much wanted to own my lands after they had me declared dead! Naturally, I had to tell them something in order to reclaim Bag End.”

“You were hardly dragged, Uncle Bilbo. And afterwards, you enjoyed telling the tale so much that you shared it with the faunts at every family gathering and started writing a book about it,” Frodo added fondly, a bit of amusement lightening his face and transforming it, making him look quite young. Too young to be away from his homeland, almost.

“It’s history, Frodo my lad. Hobbit and dwarf history. It deserves to be preserved for-“

“For future generations,” Frodo finished, smiling softly. “Yes, uncle. I know.”

“Frodo? Bilbo? My dear hobbits, the rest of the Council is waiting for you. What seems to be the –“ Mithrandir broke off and gazed at Kili steadily. “Kili, son of Vili. I might have known.”

“Gandalf. You don’t seem very surprised,” Kili noted.

“Do you honestly believe that I have not spoken with Radagast the Brown in these past eighty years?”

“You might have told me about it,” Bilbo grumbled.

“Aye,” Gloin muttered, casting a flinty look in Mithrandir’s direction. “Or his kin.”

“It is not in the nature of wizards to embroil themselves in family affairs,” Mithrandir replied with an affected air of dignity.

“Oh, no, of course not,” Bilbo retorted. “Only to drag perfectly respectable hobbits out of their smials and off on adventures.”

“Speak for yourself, Uncle Bilbo,” Frodo said wryly. “No one in Hobbiton has ever considered _me_ respectable.”

Waving his words away, Bilbo teased, “Oh, don’t pretend with me, my boy. You’ve always enjoyed scandalizing the county.”

“Mmm, yes,” Mithrandir agreed, raising a thick eyebrow at his short friend. “I wonder where he gets that from.”

“Why, from you, of course.”

Mithrandir sent Bilbo a look of mock consternation. “Yes, well, if you would be so kind as to follow me. The Council, after all, cannot start without you.”

Curious. What could warrant inviting two hobbits to a council of elves and dwarves in Elrond’s halls – a council which would have been unique enough on its own? More still, how could the two hobbits standing before her possibly be the key figures? The longer Tauriel and Kili were in Rivendell, the more questions she had, and she was more than ready to start discovering the answers.

Taking the initiative, Tauriel began to walk towards the balcony from whence Gandalf had emerged.

She was not certain why she had imagined the surprises would cease once she reached the balcony, but regardless of her reasoning, she was wrong.

As soon as she stepped out and drew the attention of the awaiting congregation, a tall figure leapt to his feet and called her name. She stilled, staring at her oldest friend, estranged for these past decades.

“Legolas!”

She felt Kili stepping around to stand at her side, his hand coming up to rest upon her arm protectively, and she knew without looking that he had the other hand resting on the pommel of his sword.

Legolas looked down at Kili and the fledgling joy on his face gave way somewhat to bitterness, old and faint, but there still.

“My Lord,” Kili said, his mild tone belied by his protective stance.

“My Lord,” Legolas replied, inclining his head to acknowledge the sign of respect.

“Just Kili, now,” her husband said. “I gave up the right to that title, or any other, a long time ago.”

At Kili’s words, for some reason, Legolas’s eyes flickered to a tall, weather-beaten Man, tired but kind in appearance, with long, dark hair and calm, piercing grey eyes. “A lack of acknowledgement towards your birthright cannot rescind it.”

The Man gave Legolas a mildly quelling look, and Legolas subsided, appearing slightly mulish. It made something fond twist in Tauriel’s chest to see her old friend behaving openly as he did when among friends, and her previously non-existent opinion of the Man, whomever he might be, rose.

“This is all very fascinating, and could be a matter of great debate some other time,” Bilbo remarked testily, “but might we all take our seats now? Some of us are not quite a young as we once were.”

Legolas’s friend cast an indulgent look towards where Bilbo stood behind Tauriel, and she blinked and moved herself and Kili out of the way, allowing Frodo to pass by with Bilbo leaning against him.

“My apologies,” she said softly. “We did not intend to be in the way.”

Frodo turned to look at her over his shoulder as he walked to the far side of the dais, a small, kind smile on his lips. “That’s alright, my Lady. No harm done.”

For a moment, Tauriel experienced the sort of disorientation she might expect from missing a step on the stairs. No one had ever addressed her with such an honorific. Yet, if Legolas’s words regarding Kili’s status held true – and Tauriel supposed that, to some degree, they must – the title was rightfully hers.

She said none of this, choosing instead to simply offer Frodo a sincere, “Thank you, Master Baggins.”

“Oh, call me Frodo, please. I believe we shall all be thoroughly confused before the end of this meeting if we insist on such formalities.”

“Yes, of course. Call me Tauriel, then, if you will,” she replied as she followed the two hobbits, Kili joining her by nature of the hand he still kept on her arm.

Frodo helped his uncle to be seated and then took a chair of his own. Tauriel felt rather bold in taking the seat beside Bilbo, but none gainsayed her choice as she and Kili settled, with Gandalf taking the remaining open spot at Frodo’s other side. Gimli and Gloin took up the spots beside Kili, Gimli leveling a challenging glare at him as though warning him against disappearing for a second time, whilst Kili tried to smile back. He looked rather more as though he had a toothache, and his lip was growing quite dark and swollen around the split skin. Tauriel made a mental note to put some salve on it for him later.

“Now that we are all here,” Lord Elrond said with some small degree of irony, before sobering, “we have much to discuss.”


End file.
